The convergence of computing and communications technologies is making it possible for mobile communication devices to access information nearly anywhere and anytime. The technologies supporting wide area wireless networking and mobile telephony, for example, are in the process of merging to provide an infrastructure that offers nearly ubiquitous on-line access. These technologies enable mobile communication devices (e.g., mobile phones, personal digital assistants, notebook computers, laptops, etc.) to access applications or any form of digital content on the Internet via a mobile communication network, such as, a carrier network or other wireless connection to the Internet.
A typical mobile communication device interfaces with a carrier network that provides mobile data communications, in addition to traditional voice services. For data communications, the carrier network may include a carrier server that provides an interface to sources on the Internet (e.g., web servers). The web servers may provide a specially-configured mobile website that provides any combination of content and/or functionality via suitable protocols for mobile communication. Mobile websites are typically configured and/or formatted to address certain limitations inherent in mobile communication devices, such as, for example, the reduced size of mobile communication devices and other device or network limitations (e.g., display size, processing power, battery life, bandwidth, etc.). For example, to provide an improved user experience in the mobile environment, many content providers customize the design of the mobile website to address these and other limitations.
Mobile websites may be custom designed for the mobile environment using specific computer languages, such as, for example, style sheet languages. Style sheet languages (e.g., Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)) are used to describe the presentation of the mobile website in a markup language (e.g., HTML, XHTML, or other markup languages). Style sheet languages are designed to enable the separation of the document content from the document presentation. This content-presentation separation can be used in the design of the mobile website to specify different presentation schemes based on different types of mobile communication devices or other situations. The presentation schemes typically specify, for example, different markup tags, image sizes, and amount of content on the page. The presentation schemes are used based on, for example, the type of network supported by the mobile communication device, the size of the screen on the device, processing power, and other features and/or capabilities supported by the mobile communication device.
However, this solution has several limitations. The content provider is still required to define the particular presentation schemes and configure the mobile website in such a manner to support the presentation schemes. Because of the large number of customization parameters and scenarios, it can be very time-consuming and costly to define and configure the mobile website to support a large number of presentation schemes. The increasingly large number of types of mobile communication devices and the changing preferences of their users exacerbate this problem.
Thus, there is a need in the industry for improved systems, methods, and computer programs for profiling the presentation schemes for mobile websites.